William Hammett Profile and BIO

William Hammett is a professional ghostwriter and editor with more than twenty-five years of full-time experience working across fiction and nonfiction. His work includes memoir, literary and genre fiction, and complex nonfiction, often involving sensitive material, high-stakes subject matter, or long-form projects requiring discretion and structural rigor.

He has collaborated with published authors, novelists, public figures, and professionals across a wide range of fields, and much of his work involves expanding or sustaining established writing projects and narrative fiction franchises. His practice emphasizes ethical collaboration, confidentiality (NDA plus contractual), and narrative intelligence rather than formulaic production.

He is adept at utilizing a client’s narrative voice or desired style, adapting the correct tone and rhythm to match the needs of a given project. He is a literary ghostwriter with multiple advanced university degrees and received academic training in editing, textual analysis, and literary criticism. With intimate knowledge of publishing and the literary marketplace, Hammett offers verified testimonials from past clients and has an extensive online collection of fiction and nonfiction writing samples (forty-two) on his website.

In addition to ghostwriting and editorial work, Hammett publishes fiction under his own name. His novel John Lennon and the Mercy Street Café (2007) has been taught in university courses on magical realism, and his short fiction and poetry have appeared in over two hundred respected literary journals. Recent titles include Street Magic, The Ghost of Richard Brautigan, Rimsky Rises (YA), and Circling Goes the Wind (middle reader). All are available commercially on Amazon.

He forwards work in installments and conducts a final revision of all projects. He is skilled in working with source materials and partial manuscripts as well as with AI-generated rough drafts.  Fee structure is unique in that clients pay for professional time used rather than flat fees. In fiction, his preferred genres are science fiction, fantasy, horror, thriller, detective, mystery, romance, literary, and juvenile.

Queries from literary agents, editors, and serious collaborators are welcome. Hammett works selectively and values projects where craft, credibility, and long-form thinking matter more than speed or volume. Further information about scope and subject areas is available on his website.

Index of Articles

Ray Bradbury's ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITING

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury is the best book on writing I have ever read.

The advice Bradbury gives? Sit down and start typing. If you don't have an idea, just tap the keys at random. Sooner or later, you will form words, sentences, and paragraphs.

Get in the flow, the zone. Eventually, you will have written a short story or a novel. It's simple, but it works.

Writer's block doesn't have to happen. Engage the gears in your brain, and good things will happen.

All the time. Really.

Cousin Dashiell Hammett

Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) was a writer of hardboiled mysteries and produced works such as The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, The Continental Op, and Red Harvest.

 

Dash, as he was known by his lover and friend Lillian Hellman, influenced writers such as Raymond Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of the Perry Mason series. The modern detective genre wouldn’t exist without Dashiell Hammett.

 

He had a short, clipped prose style that would influence the spare sentence structure of Ernest Hemingway.

 

After digging through archives, I discovered he was my second cousin. And that’s pretty cool.

Index of Articles

Lovingkindness: The Most Beautiful Word in the English Language

This is a really short post because the word says it all.

The word is lyrical, beautiful, soothing, and rolls off the tongue.

It’s technical definition? The word naturally connotes a combination of love and kindness, but there is a synergy between the two concepts when they’re joined into “lovingkindness.” It represents a totality of compassion, mercy, kindness, love, forgiveness, and understanding.

 

To me, it’s almost mystical in meaning. Suffice it to say that if the world practiced lovingkindness, we would all be living in paradise by tomorrow.

 

It’s the only mantra anyone ever needs.

~William Hammett

Index of Articles

The Buddha's Tour Dates Have Been Canceled

Here's a bit of flash fiction, also called micro-fiction, that is 750 words or less. Or you can call it a short short story.

The Buddha's tour dates were cancelled, and ticket-holders have been refunded their money.  Sometimes the Buddha doesn't have much to say.  Often, he plays life close to the vest, sitting serenely like a potato trying to figure out its tuberous karma.  The Katmandu Gazette reports that he hasn't opened his eyes in several days.

His roadies have dismantled the Bodhi tree and the pagoda.  The tour hasn't been rescheduled, and some say that the cancellation is because the Buddha is consulting a gastroenterologist in Buffalo.  This is only speculation, and sources close to the Buddha have emphatically denied that his chakras are blocked.  Rolling Stone has written that the Buddha recently suffered a nervous breakdown after learning he'd fathered a love child.  The truth remains elusive, which is what you'd expect in such a situation.

Personally, I don't have a dog in the fight.  If truth is subjective, the tour was over a long time ago.  We can stare at kumquats.

~William Hammett

Index of Articles

Lucid Dreaming: The Pathway to Creativity

Paul Simon dreamed his latest album, titled Seven Psalms, into existence. It’s a great piece of music.

He had a dream during the pandemic in which a voice told him that his next project would be called Seven Psalms. He got up every night for ten months and wrote down words and music that came to him between 3:30 a.m. and 5 a.m. Simon’s dreams were normal, not lucid, but lucid dreams are even more exciting.

 

Robert Louis Stevenson usually got his ideas from dream incubation. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the best-known example.

 

Lucid dreaming is the next step in learning from dreams.

 

Lucid dreaming happens when you become aware you’re dreaming, and that’s when the dreamscape becomes as real as waking reality. It’s an altered state that is within everyone’s grasp.

 

If you want to know what you should be writing or harvest characters or ideas from your subconscious, use lucid dreaming. In lucid dreams, you can interact with situations and people and have perfect control over the dream.

 

Try out a plot, ask what the next chapter should be, or allow the dream to show you possibilities you hadn’t thought of.

 

Explore. You are, after all, a writer. It’s what we do.

~William Hammett

Index of Articles